Machine Elves. What are they? Where do they reside? Why do they seem so interested in showing human psychonauts impossible objects and gifts? Why have so many felt, in their presence, that they were "home" again? Also, is it possible for us to come to a group consensus on their basal form? Any ancedotes, trip reports, etc involving the Elves is also welcome.

I have theories concerning each of these questions but would love to get some discussion going before I go any further.

Also, I've made this thread before on this very board a few months ago. Before it could get any views or replies it was deleted. Now I'm back hoping that Machine Elves aren't a taboo topic anymore.

Having enjoyed DMT many times at low and high dose ranges I have yet to experience them or any form of entity. I would like to read more about them myself.

The machine elves deleted your previous thread, obviously. They don't want to be boxed in by humans into meaningless definitions and silly illustrations.

That being said, here's my best shot at it.

First of all it's kinda weird that it has become such a stereotype in the psychedelic circles since after all it's just a term coined by Terrence McKenna in an attempt to convert some of the elements of hyperspace into a monkey language. And for that I applaud him, since that is way harder than it first seems. But the thing is it should only be meaningful to Terrence himself but people have started assigning it to various things that they see in there instead of coming up with their own novel descriptions. It's way easier to write trip reports saying you saw machine elves than to actually start describing the things you saw. And don't get me wrong language is a great invention but it's completely useless when it comes to the abstract psychedelic breakthrough. I would prefer to use images or animations but even they fall short by a long shot since you can't convert symphonies of total synaesthesia into 2D arrays made for just one sensory organ. In the near future with VR we'll experience art through all of our sensory organs simultaeously and in full 3D, but EVEN THAT won't give artists enough resources to represent the higher-dimentional aspects of a breakthrough experience. But it'll be hell of a lot better than just using combinations of letters that anyone can assign their own personal meaning to.

Anyway, to get back on topic, the closest thing I've experienced that represents any kind of a "jeweled self-dribbling basketball" is those things that are kind of everywhere in the fabric of hyperspace and they make these queer audiovisual sounds(?) that invoke feelings very similar to our concepts of elves and gnomes and all those kinds of anthropomorphic peculiar little creatures. This video is the closest piece of art I've seen representing them, I mean specifically the little things that are morphing at the sides of the animation. But don't take it at face value they don't actually look anything like that it's just a similar feeling that the visual elements invoke. Like millions of little buggers that are everywhere and transforming into the weirdest shapes and forms and being very excited and curious about your human presence. And it kind of feels like they communicate with you telepathically with millions of little voices synchronized perfectly through a hivemind of machine elves. There's seemingly an infinite amount of them but they are all one and the same. Perhaps they are all you and you are them.

I used to side with daeda in regards to Terence and the way people hold to Terence's descriptions, however in light of some recent experiences over the past couple months, I have come to disagree. I've been encountering this one elf in particular lately. Whatever you think an elf sounds like is exactly what this guy's voice sounds like. It's got that compressed, nasal, pip-squeak voice. I've gone into this in detail in several other threads, but being that this one is specifically designed to talk about the elves themselves, and our experience of them, perhaps it bears repeating.

The elf I encounter appears to be different in a number of ways from the majority of other entities I encounter. For one, practically every other entity I've encountered (I think without exception) is made of the same light and energy that all the rest of hyperspace including all its landscapes and objects are made of. When touched, they feel like concentrations of magnetic energy. The elf on the other hand does not present itself to me in a similar fashion. For one, he appears rather solid and physical. If he jumps on my body, he feels very much real and physical, and not so magnetic.

Sometimes he doesn't even seem to be sharing the same space as the rest of hyperspace as if he somehow has some kind of unique "outsider" perspective. It's hard to describe, but he just doesn't seem to fall on the same plane(s) as everything else sometimes.

Then there's also the exception of the way he speaks to me. Unlike most other entities (with the exception of the Godhead), this entity uses sound to communicate as opposed to the more regular telepathic communication from the others. Often times the telepathic communication will be in languages I can't understand, or if it is in English, it's just gibberish; all the words are in English, it's just that when you put them together like that it doesn't make any sense. The elf however sounds like he's talking like a physical entity. If he's off to the left of me, I can hear and feel the sound coming in my left ear more than the right. He speaks in perfect English with good grammar, and with sentences that not only make sense, but in my last encounter, he was fully narrating what was going on in my rapid vision in real-time, which I continue to find intriguing considering that I had no clue what was going on, but he was doing a damn good job of letting me know.

So to get back to daeda's point, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of people who end up being so influenced by Terence, that they just end up naming any old mechanical shape shifting entity from hyperspace a Machine Elf, and without a doubt, many who encounter entities will never encounter the elves, but nonetheless I believe that they are very much a real phenomena, and not as poetic as we sometimes claim them to be. On one encounter, I literally felt like I was in an elf factory. All the aesthetics were just so loopy, silly and cute, like out of a Christmas movie.

Global that is very interesting , and just shows how different the experience can be and how much it can change for even the same person..

And what you wrote reminds me of a thing I've been curious about for a long time, I hope the OP won't mind me borrowing the thread for it as it's a bit offtopic. I've been wondering do some people get experiences where they are in environments similar to the real world, like concrete 3D scenes , very much like in dreams for example ? Granted I don't have that much experience yet but every single time for me (or atleast what i can remember) things are just totally abstract and there's nothing to relate to real-world elements, a breakthrough for me often means like losing all dimensions and becoming a singularity, and it just destroys any attempt to try to convert it back to 3D mediums. But then I read stuff like this and it makes me wonder if people are also sometimes having dreamlike scenes with dmt.. Like the way you describe your elf, that he appears solid and physical and speaks perfect english. Does that mean that there's like a scene and you also have a body and you can look around and look at your hands? That is incredibly fascinating and makes me wonder what are the variables that decide the nature of the experience.. If there even are any variables, maybe it's just some form of true randomness manifested into apparent meaning.


edit: come to think of it, I did have one real-life situation where I transformed into a snake and was living my snake life in a real jungle, but that was on the comedown of aya, one of those comedown waves, and it just felt so.. different, like an exception to the rule

I typically find that most a lot of the most aesthetically pleasing visions are those that are representative of things scenes for real life (though I would never mistake them for being awake in consensual reality as in a dream). I don't have a body or hands either (or if I do, it's just my real body sitting on the couch/chair and it's out of sight because my eyes are closed. An intriguing example that instantly comes to mind, a place that I've visited on numerous occasions is this mansion. It has a number of rooms (and inhabitants) such as hallways, a vaulted living room, crawl spaces, and perhaps most interesting is the child's bedroom. There is a bookshelf with what appears to be children's books on them (I've never seen their contents or titles or anything, but they just look like children's books from their spines) - these pink and green books. There are toys strewn on the floor like rubber ducks, toy cars, etc...There is a bed, tidily made with a fluffy comforter and some pillows. But again, I would never mistake it for real life. It is very much clearly hyperspace, and it's high-def and well-defined. Sometimes I see some entities running up and down a ladder of a house outside, and they make pitch-precise sine wave bleeps as they move through each rung with computer precision.
[Edit]: Furthermore, I do not navigate the mansion myself for example. I'm taken on a tour of what the entities there want me to see. Sometimes I see some rooms, sometimes I'll see others. It took me a couple revisitations to realize that it was all the same place.

That's one simple example. Much of my Egyptian experiences also take place in...well places like temples with turquoise-encrusted columns, pharaoh heads on the walls, sandy hallways, etc....It's all made of the same energy as the more abstract parts of hyperspace. The elf as I mentioned is the anomaly for me because he doesn't not appear to be made of the energy in the same way as virtually everything else.

im more often than not in a place which is very similar to consensus reality, its quite rare for me to be in a place of Fractal Swirly Geometric Abstraction, the times when i have been in the FSGA have all seemed like lighter experiences.

i will give you few examples of real places i have been deposited...

1. i once apeared in a caribean kitchen, i was in the corner looking around and i could see normal kitchen scene with pots, pans, cupboards and sideboards. Out of the window i could see the beach and the sea lapping against it. In the kitchen were 2 short fat black ladies cooking a bit pot of something. Although the colour intensity was different the scene was essentially "normal"

2. I was deposited into the back seat of a car in the carpark of a supermarket.

3. i appeared in a back garden in Australia while someone was BBQing, they had there back to me so i couldnt see them but i gazed to my side and there was a jester leaning against the side of the house, i remember correctly he put his finger to his lips and said ssshhhhhhhh. it wasnt a cartoon jester, it was like the character from IT but a little less sinister.

i have never seen a machine elf.


in all these experiences i didnt have a body i was just awareness floating about and observing what was going on.

Maybe an answer as to what machine elves are is what are we to them? I reckon if i had a mirror in hyperspace i would see another machine elf reflected back at me.
I always see them even on very low doses with eyes shut, although i am not heavily experienced in hyperspace matters.

They chatter away and the only word i can ever remember is "examine" , maybe they want me to examine them and their dimension/world or they want to examine the new addition to their own reality.I reckon each person has their own style of elf because nothing prepared me for the first time i encountered one of mine!

Maybe they are the guardians of the virtual reality program that we live in.
Maybe they are the data in the program.
Maybe they are the spirits of our fleshy selves after we pass on.
Maybe they are guides in a journey to join with the mass consciousness.
Maybe it"s just my brain trying to make visual sense of the psychedelic turmoil i sometimes put it through.

I really do not know what they are or where they are. I guess they"re whatever you think they are.